Different bloggers will be posting some musings, questions we're pondering, and maybe some announcements related to the philosophical community at Bethel University. Responses are encouraged, whether you're directly connected to Bethel or not. And be sure to like our facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/bethelphilosophy

The book took a long time to read; the review took a long time to write; and Mind took a much longer time publishing it. (But they're Mind of course, G.E. Moore's old journal. They could take as long as they wanted, and I would not complain.) The whole experience was worthwhile, particularly reading the book. Hopefully you can get some idea of the value of the book by reading the review!

By the way, the picture below is relevant to the argument of the book. This is a Gothic cathedral. Some Gothic cathedrals were made to image a heavenly city. Recognizing this fact can lead you to see the cathedral differently than you did before. Wynn explores how, similarly, understanding the sensory world as being a divine creation can lead you to experience the sensory world differently -- it can light the world up, so to speak. In that way, and others besides, a robust spiritual life can renew the senses.

Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Peter Singer is well-known for how seriously he takes
utilitarianism.It leads him to a strong
defense of animal rights, to controversial views concerning care for those with severe disabilities, and to the promotion of philanthropy.

He’s at it again.In
this article from the Wall Street Journal,
he talks about his goal to have wealthy people give away one-third of their
income.But not to just any cause, of
course – he chastises David Geffen for giving $100 million to renovate part of
the Lincoln Center in New York, when that money could be better used to prevent
starvation and disease in impoverished parts of the world.

I think it’s clear that we ought to give more than we
do.There is something obscene about how
much money we have, and how we spend it, in a world where there is so much
poverty and suffering.

At the same time, there are legitimate questions about how much to give, and about what causes to support.The following story illustrates the
problem.Back in the 1980’s, famines in
Ethiopia made headlines and prompted rock stars to come together, record
(historically bad) songs, and hold concerts, with the proceeds going to famine
relief.The success of those efforts is still unclear, leading many people to wonder whether donations to such causes do any good.

In 2013, Peter Singer gave a TED talk in which he addressed some of these
questions.The video is
posted.Note two things about what he
says.First, many of the philanthropists he
highlights are philosophers.Yay philosophers!

Second, Singer’s answers are, again,
thoroughly utilitarian.By his lights we
need to think of our philanthropic decisions in terms of overall
consequences.We need to approach these
matters from "the perspective of the universe."Rather than giving a blind person a guide dog, we should use that same
money to cure blindness in hundreds of people in developing countries.Singer doesn’t say so explicitly, but he
clearly thinks this reasoning applies even
if the blind individual is your own child.Is he right?

Sunday, April 5, 2015

Our colleague Don Postema has worked as a bioethics consultant at local hospitals for many years. For the most part that has been a job on the side, to complement his full-time teaching at Bethel. But this semester the roles have reversed, and the press has taken note! Check out this article from the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

Monday, March 23, 2015

Can something come from nothing? According to physicist Lawrence Krauss, science tell us that that's a piece of cake. In today's post, Chris Lilley, a Bethel philosophy grad and current PhD student at Marquette University, reviews the book in which Krauss tries to explain how the universe came to be from nothing. I have also posted a video of an entertaining debate between Krauss and William Lane Craig.

In this provocative book, theoretical physicist and
rising “New Atheist” star Lawrence Krauss has thrown his intellectual hat into
the ring by attempting to address what has heretofore been somewhat of a weak
spot in the atheist camp, namely an answer to a question famously posed by the
philosopher Leibniz, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” From the
outset, Krauss pulls no punches concerning his intent in writing the book,
excoriating what he deems the “intellectual bankruptcy” of theologians and
philosophers who insist that something cannot come from nothing (xxiv). Rather,
Krauss insists once this question is extracted from the idealized realm of
religion and philosophy, the natural sciences can quite ably provide an answer
to the question of how the universe originated from nothing. The aim then, for
Krauss, is to demonstrate to us exactly how it is science can answer this
perplexing problem (xxiii).

In the first portion of the book (chaps. 1–6), Krauss guides the reader through
a whirlwind tour of the latest advances in cosmology and astrophysics,
organized around the overarching theme that science can provide us with genuine
insight about the universe by leading us down paths that religion and
philosophy dare not trod. Starting with the groundbreaking discovery that our
universe had a beginning in the finite and measurable past (due in large part
to the Jesuit priest Georges Lemaître) known as the “Big Bang” (21), Krauss
emphasizes how further scientific research has prompted two key realizations.
First, the universe is composed not simply of visible matter, but also, and to
a very large degree, “dark matter” (34); and second, our best mapping of the
background radiation of the universe, enables us to conclude that the universe
is not curved, but is flat in the sense that light travels through it in straight
lines (54). Krauss notes however that even with the addition of dark matter,
roughly 70 percent of the energy required for the universe to come out flat is simply
missing (55). It is here that Krauss begins to move toward the puzzle how something
might come from nothing, and describes in detail his startling proposal that
the missing energy can be found residing not in matter, but in empty space
itself (75). For what may seem for all intents and purposes like empty space is
really a realm of quantum fluctuations able to give rise to energy from genuine
“quantum nothingness” in what Krauss considers to be the quintessential example
of a cosmic “free lunch” (98).

After introducing us to the intriguing possibility of how something can come
from “nothing,” Krauss devotes the remainder of the book (chaps. 7–11) to
applying this possibility to the problem of the origin of the universe itself.
For Krauss, advances in science have now placed us in a better position to
answer the question of why there is something rather than nothing. In fact, it
helps us to understand that the significant question is not “why” but “how,” a
question that we can answer through study of the natural world (144). For
Krauss, the answer simply resides in the fact that “nothing” is not really
nothing, but rather seemingly empty space endowed with energy from which
“something” can genuinely arise (152). Further, Krauss argues that given the
implications of quantum gravity, universes may very well appear spontaneously
out of nothing even in the absence of space and time, which ultimately answers
the question of how the universe came from nothing at all (171). This, Krauss
concludes, is the scientific answer to the question of why there is something
rather than nothing.

Krauss’s book, while engaging and stimulating in its prose, nevertheless is
plagued by a conceptual identity crisis. As a work of popular science
literature, A Universe From Nothing
is a dazzling display of science writing at its very best, with Krauss deftly
handing some highly technical and complex scientific ideas in ways that make
them open and accessible to the non–specialist. Unfortunately, Krauss becomes
less convincing when he shifts from describing the science behind astrophysics
and cosmology to providing an answer to the philosophical question of why there
is something rather than nothing. This difficulty stems from a severe
misunderstanding of what the question means. The heart of Krauss’s proposal
seems to be that while for centuries theologians and philosophers have labored
under the mistaken assumption that empty space was nothing, science has now
shown us that not only what seems to be “nothing” actually contains energy at
the quantum level, but that the universe itself could have sprung from this
nothingness.

However, what Krauss has simply done is equivocated the “nothing” which
philosophers take to be the absolute absence of anything at all with a
“nothing” that for Krauss is simply a particular description of quantum energy
inhabiting empty space. The end result is that all Krauss has provided us with
is a scientifically informed description of how something can come from
something, which is not a particularly startling philosophical revelation.
While Krauss does seem to acknowledge that he has not answered the puzzle of
the origin of the universe in a way that is philosophically convincing, Krauss
simply dismisses this fact and retorts that all this means is “nature may be
cleverer than philosophers or theologians” (174). Unfortunately, this cavalier
attitude towards any form of reasoning outside of the natural sciences
characterizes much of Krauss’s book, which is peppered with thinly veiled
invectives against philosophy and theology.

In sum, while Krauss has offered a stimulating and
up-to-date account of the latest advances in astrophysics, he falls
considerably short of his goal of demonstrating how science answers the
question of why there is something rather than nothing.

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

The following comes from our colleague Paul Reasoner, describing his work in Cebu in the Philippines last month. As a little background, Paul, his wife Shari, and their children have done remarkable work at an orphanage in Cebu over the years. Here Paul describes is a major development connected with that work...

I spent a few weeks in January in the
Philippines where I have been working on putting together a Habitat for
Humanity project for three years.This
is a joint project between Habitat for Humanity-Minnesota and Habitat for
Humanity-Philippines to build homes for Filipino staff at the Children’s
Shelter of Cebu (CSC), an orphanage started by Bethel Philosophy Department
grad Paul Healy and his wife Marlys in 1979.Many of the employees of CSC live in marginal housing and my son Joel (who
has been working at CSC for 8 years) and I have wanted to do something
significant for them.My role has been
in putting the project together and, of course, fundraising.

On January 7 land was purchased and on
January 22 we had a ground breaking ceremony.The CEO for HFH-Philippines, Charlie Ayco, flew down from Manila for the
occasion and Jan Plimpton, Executive Director of HFH-MN, also took part in the
ceremony.(She traveled to Cebu with me
and we also visited HFH rebuild sites in Bohol, Cebu, and Leyte related to the
typhoon and earthquake disasters.)But
most important, a number of the employees of CSC who will be getting new homes
were able to be present.The actual
building of the 70+ homes should start this spring, and I expect to be back in
Cebu again this summer to continue working on the project.

The site of the housing project

The ground-breaking. Paul is 2nd from the left.

Some of the workers at the orphanage who will get houses.

Paul speaking at the ground-breaking ceremony.

If you want to contribute to this cause or participate in a Bike Trainer Ride fundraising event, please see the following links:

Online donations can be made here (2.2% plus $0.30 handling charge on each donation):

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Bethel and UW - Milwaukee graduate John Granditswrites about distinguishing varieties of theism, atheism, and agnosticism.

A friend of mine was recently walking in a park in San Diego
and came across a local atheist group selling t-shirts and Skeptic
magazine. They also had a banner that read, "Ask an atheist a question. You
might like the answer." My friend, a philosophy graduate student, took the
bait. I'm not sure what questions he asked, but he told me that the group of
six atheists ended up unanimously endorsing a position that embraced both
agnosticism and atheism. They told him, "Agnosticism has to do with
knowledge, whereas atheism has to do with belief," to which my friend
responded "Huh?"

The confusion that my friend felt is also the confusion that
I notice among many people when they get in debates about theism, atheism, and
agnosticism. Some people claim to "lack belief in God" while others
say they "believe that God does not exist" while some label
themselves as agnostic atheists or agnostic theists. This is all very confusing.
So what is the difference between these positions?

To answer this question, I think it's helpful to talk in
terms of attitudes toward the proposition "God exists." Generally
speaking, for any proposition P, you can either believe P, believe not-P, or
neither. If we apply this to "God exists," there are those that
believe that God exists (P), those who believe that God does not exist (not-P),
and those who neither believe that God exists nor that God does not exist
(neither P nor not-P). I think it's appropriate to call these theists,
atheists, and agnostics, respectively.

So what are we to make of the atheists in the park who claim
to be agnostic atheists? How is this not a contradiction? I think the implicit
distinction they have in mind is between one's attitude toward P and one's
attitude toward whether one knows that P. For instance, if I believe that P, I
can go on to claim to know that P, claim to not know P, or neither. That is, if
I am a theist, then, regarding the proposition "I know that P"--call
this KP--I can believe KP, believe not-KP, or neither believe KP nor not-KP.
Likewise, if I am an atheist, then, regarding the proposition "I know that
not-P"--call this KnP--I can believe KnP, believe not-KnP, or neither. On
this view, an agnostic atheist is one who believes not-P (this is what makes
him an atheist) but he neither believes KnP nor not-KnP (this is what makes him
an agnostic). The following table attempts to fill in the rest of the logical
space:

Believe KP/KnP

Believe not-KP/KnP

Neither KP/Knp nor not-KP/KnP

Believe P

Strong theism

Weak theism

Agnostic theism

Believe not-P

Strong atheism

Weak atheism

Agnostic atheism

Neither P nor not-P

N/A

Agnosticism Proper?

Agnosticism Proper?

So I think part of the confusion over these issues results
from a failure to make this distinction between one's attitude toward P and
one's attitude toward one’s knowledge that P. Further confusion results from
the fact that agnosticism is sometimes defined, not as the (negative) position
in which one neither believes P nor not-P, but as the (positive) belief that
knowledge about P is impossible. However, on the way I have set things up, this
kind of agnosticism would be a subcategory of those in the second column in the
table above, i.e. those who have the more general belief that they do not know
P. That is, out of all the persons who believe that they do not know P, there
will be those who believe that knowledge about P is impossible and those who
believe it is possible. The latter of these may believe they don't know P
because, say, they believe that the evidence isn't sufficient for knowledge,
even if it could be.

There are also other subcategories that a comprehensive
taxonomy would need to include. For instance, out of all the persons who are
properly agnostic, there will be those who have never thought about or
considered P and those who have. Those who have never thought about or
considered P could be further divided into further subcategories, e.g. between
those who have never heard of, conceived of, or properly understood P and those
who have but have never taken the time to reflect on P.

I'm not sure all of this is correct, but I think this is a
useful way to start thinking about our differing attitudes, not only about the
existence of God, but about any given proposition.

Monday, January 12, 2015

A boy is about to go on his first date, and is nervous about what to talk about. He asks his father for advice. The father replies: "My son, there are three subjects that always work. These are food, family, and philosophy."

The boy picks up his date and they go to a soda fountain. Ice cream sodas in front of them, they stare at each other for a long time, as the boy's nervousness builds. He remembers his father's advice, and chooses the first topic. He asks the girl: "Do you like potato pancakes?" She says "No," and the silence returns.

After a few more uncomfortable minutes, the boy thinks of his father's suggestion and turns to the second item on the list. He asks, "Do you have a brother?" Again, the girl says "No" and there is silence once again.

The boy then plays his last card. He thinks of his father's advice and asks the girl the following question: "If you had a brother, would he like potato pancakes?"

Friday, January 9, 2015

This comes from the APA (American Philosophical Association). We are proud of some people on the list, but others . . . not so much. (And maybe you're proud of different members than we are.) Here it is.

Just so you know, our posting is less regular during the craziness of January term. Bethel alumni, or alumni of other schools who have January terms, will understand how busy (and fun) this time can be. We will increase production as second semester begins. If any of you readers has something you want to contribute to the blog, please contact us through our facebook page, which is here.